I usually append /h/ to the URL (/mail/h/) and get a HTML version. It can work even without JS and it has classic design with small rows that works well on my small screen. No Material Design and no huge elements with large offsets.
I hope you have noticed that in GMail you can swtich between different "density" modes. In your Inbox, click on the cogwheel on the right-hand top corner and select the second option "Display density". The "Compact" setting is actually rather dense. Although, it mostly affects the density of rows (conversations) in your inbox and does not scale e.g. the search box input field above.
Oh wow that is a stark contrast. yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.co.in, yahoo.co.id, etc. are all incredibly low-density as well. I have always loved the Japanese aesthetic, I wonder if any other cultures have a similar preference for websites.
Sounds like me. On the couch or walking around I'm at 10-12 inches away. I wonder--do people who don't prefer high information density hold their devices farther away?
I just tried that, and noticed promotions in the inbox, the non-HTML version separated the "primary" from the "promotions". Are they merging them to keep HTML version annoying?
I always assumed the behaviour and categorization was in their backend. I think its weird that the view (HTML vs javascript) is not decoupled from the model?
While that is possible it would make no sense. Why spend time refactoring code to improve a legacy UI for old browsers almost nobody is using? Legacy UI doesn't know anything about categorization because it was added later.
Actually Gmail's approach is sane. They just keep old UI working as it used to many years ago although the backend could have changed completely.
what exactly are they supposed to do in the backend?
they probably have an api in which you can limit the results by category. As the old interface doesn't have any limiter implemented, they're getting all the results back.
you can also disable categories in the newer interface and the effect would be the same (everything in the inbox)
I ended up going to Thunderbird for my main email addresses (work & personal), with Rainmail for quasi-disposable addresses on my various domains. Works much better than Gmail did towards the end of my years using Gmail.
I have to use Thunderbird for work and I wish it was 1% as good as Gmail. The search sucks, it's slow to receive mail, it crashes quite often. Either your Gmail is profoundly broken or you have a magic Thunderbird. In case the latter is true: do you have any tips to optimise Thunderbird?
Have been running Thunderbird for G-Apps based work email for over a year (Fedora 26,27). Using the Provider for Google Calendar extension works well for integrating calendar into Thunderbird.
Other than fighting with the calendar occasionally (sometimes needing to force a manual sync to see coworkers' events), Gmail in Thunderbird has been pretty smooth. I have not noticed slow search, slow mail receipt, or application crashes. In fact, the search is often too good, in that after running it it matches hundreds of more emails than I usually expect. I usually stick with the quick filter which is a bit less flexible, but generally returns more useful results.
Another advantage, on Linux at least, is that if you copy your ~/.thunderbird folder to another machine, all accounts, GUI layouts, settings, search results, tabs, etc move over flawlessly. I think you just have to re-sign in for Google accounts on the new machine and you are good to go.
I would check that Google isn't ratelimiting you, and I would also check that your hard drive/SSD and RAM aren't dying. I've experienced issues like what you describe, but the first time was caused by a dying hard disk, and the 2nd by Google limiting the number of IMAP connections to a hilariously low number.
Thunderbird is quite a piece of crap. Apart from the core, everything else is written in javascript and thus it is a single-core web application.
I have decided to just leave it be, and let it hog my computer, because it interface decently with google calendar.
That being said, I can definitely vouch for clients like Claws Mail (a bit ugly, but does its job) and Evolution (super fast, but it's written in C#/Mono)
What is all this stuff even doing?